Tag Archives: Martial Arts

Regular readers to this site may have noticed my curious affection for the DTV martial arts flick. Thus it would be churlish of me to ignore Bloodmoon, a 1997 example of the genre, seeing as it features not one but TWO of my fellow Brits. A handful of Britkickers have made names for themselves as nasty roundeye bad guy types in Hong Kong martial arts films; the likes of Mark Haughton, Sophia Crawford and Jude Poyer have all spent time getting beaten on by Asian stars du jour. Probably the most successful of these is one Gary Daniels, a remarkable martial artist who has a Judge Dredd-style square jaw, the physique of Schwarzenegger and amazing kung fu/karate/kickboxing skills, coupled with the acting ability of a wooden badger. Daniels has appeared in some 30-odd films, but is still best known as the imposing ‘Pony tail fighter’ in Wong Jing’s lame Jackie Chan vehicle City Hunter.

Back in the 1980s, American pop consciousness got really obsessed with the Vietnam War. Serious questions about what the war meant to the American psyche manifested in a variety of mediums, none so readily exploitable as film. And film, like Bo Gritz, became obsessed with exploiting the notion that American POWs were still being held captive in Communist Vietnam. Gritz, amid a flurry of self-promotion and with a team comprised at least partly of bikini chicks wearing t-shirts about how awesome Bo Gritz and his howlin’ commandos were, set up shop in Thailand and began crowing about mounting rescue expeditions. Dealing with a KIA family member can be devastating; dealing with an MIA is often even worse. As far as I know, Gritz never actually amounted to much other than a huckster, and although Vietnam began a program of finding and returning remains of American servicemen, there was never any secret cache of POWs discovered. But the idea had taken root, and once that idea took root, American cinema was quick to send a seeming endless parade of would be heroes who didn’t fight in the actual war to win it for us after the fact in make believe. Uncommon Valor was the most respectable. Rambo: First Blood Part II was the most iconic.

And Ultimax Force is the movie that asked the question: what if Rambo was ninjas?

You are probably like me, at least in some ways. Many of you were Jackie Chan fans. You came in during the wild, wild days of Police Story, Project A, and Dragons Forever, or maybe a couple years later it was Drunken Master II that turned you on to Jackie. Or hell, maybe you’re even older than me, and you were around for Young Master and Dragon Lord. Whatever the case, you knew the first time you saw one of those movies that it was something special. You became obsessed, started haunting the local VHS-stocking Chinese supermarkets in search of Jackie Chan movies you’d never heard of. You began scouring other video stores for the rare dubbed domestic releases. Or you decided that it was time to enter the seedy shadow world of tape trading. Anything to get your hands on another movie, or hell, even a scrap of information. At the time, there was no world wide web. There was no Netflix. If you wanted info on Jackie Chan, or any other Hong Kong movie makers, your only sources were Rick Meyers’ column in Inside Kung Fu magazine, and word of mouth.

Back when we had to really scrounge for every scrap of information about Hong Kong action films, one of the places one had to turn was Ric Meyers’ monthly article in Inside Kungfu magazine. This was back before Meyer lost his mind, or whatever the heck happened to him and the quality of his work. Anyway, a subscription to Inside Kungfu meant you were going to learn a lot of other stuff too, like who Grandmaster Philip Holder was. It was somewhere in the pages of that magazine that I first stumbled across Kathy Long, a beautiful woman, with biceps to die for and a long string of martial arts accomplishments, tournament championships, and martial arts magazine cover appearances to her name. She wasn’t as active in movies as she was in the ring, but she quickly entered my pantheon of worship worthy American fighting femmes, right alongside Michele “The Mouse” Krasnoo, Karen Shepard, and of course, Cynthia Rothrock.

Me and Benny Chan go back a ways, and our relationship has been stormy. Some of his directorial efforts, like Who Am I and Big Bullet, I really like. Others, like New Police Story and Gen Y Cops, I really dislike. So I guess I come out even enough that when Chan makes a new movie, I figure I might as well see it. Shaolin, Chan’s first stab at a big budget period epic, is in a way the ultimate Benny Chan film for me in that I really liked about half of it and really didn’t like about half of it. It’s a movie that seems specifically designed to highlight both his strengths and weaknesses as a director.

There was nothing about the old VHS box for Shaolin Invincibles that made us think we were renting anything other than a standard “kungfu orphans get revenge on villains who murdered their parents” story. We plucked it from the shelves because, well, why not? We were up for renting anything that wasn’t Unique Lama. By the time Ocean Shores video splashed that bright red “The End” graphic onto the television screen, we’d seen tongue-waggling ghosts, bug-eyed zombies, and that most treasured of kungfu film appearances — the kungfu gorilla. I won’t say that the impact of Shaolin Invincibles on our mental faculties was as pronounced as it was after watching Young Taoism Fighter for the first time, but that’s a pretty high bar to set.

Jimmy Wang Yu was one of the most colourful figures ever to emerge from the Hong Kong movie scene. He made his debut in Temple of Red Lotus in 1965, but it wasn’t until a couple of years later that he became a megastar. The vehicle was Chang Cheh’s film The One-Armed Swordsman, a movie that gave birth to a new, bloodier and more anti-heroic trend in Hong Kong movies. Jimmy played the main character Fang Kang, a man who loses an arm and then has to learn a devastating one-limbed sword style. The film was so successful that it spawned an official sequel Return of the One-Armed Swordsman in 1969, also directed by Chang Cheh. Then in 1970 Jimmy appeared as The Chinese Boxer, in a movie considered to be the first ‘real’ kung fu film, beating Bruce Lee’s The Big Boss to Hong Kong screens by a year. But the one-armed swordsman persona wouldn’t leave him, and in 1971 he appeared in Shaw Brothers’ collaboration with Japan’s Daiei Motion Picture Co. Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman, the 22nd entry in the popular series about a blind Samurai played by Shintaro Katsu.

During the first half of the 1990s, Hong Kong was wire-fu crazy. It seems like all you had to do to get your movie made was show up at a studio waving around a napkin with “guys in robes fly around, then there’s a fart joke” scrawled on it. Even if the studio already had ten movies exactly like yours in production, producers saw no reason they couldn’t add one more to the pile. New Legend of Shaolin, starring Jet Li when he was the undisputed king of being hoisted around on wires, is the epitome of mediocre 1990s wuxia. It’s bad but not enragingly bad. It’s fight scenes are terrible but not “really terrible.” And as was almost always par for the course, the tone jumps wildly and without any transition from slapstick fart comedy to atrociously overwrought melodrama. It’s a textbook case of by-the-numbers, don’t-give-a-shit Hong Kong film making from Wong Jing, the master of by-the-numbers, don’t-give-a-shit Hong Kong film making.

The enormous popularity of pocket-sized Filipino action star Weng Weng — in the wake of his successful debut as Agent 00 in For Y’ur Height Only — was destined to be short-lived. And apparently no one was more aware of that than the people guiding his career. As a result, the dawning years of the 1980s saw the P.I.’s theater screens deluged with a mini-flood bearing the Weng Weng brand. The sequel to Height, The Impossible Kid, followed hot on the heels of it’s predecessor, seeing release in 1982, while Weng Weng’s first headlining foray into the Western genre, D’Wild Wild Weng, hit screens that same year.

My guess is that if you don’t know who Weng Weng is by now, you’re probably not the kind of person who’s going to care who Weng Weng is anyway. And if that’s the case, you obviously came upon this site by mistake. Then again, I may be wrong about that. After all, those who keep abreast of internet memes and those with a taste for obscure cult movies are not necessarily one and the same — just as, conversely, it’s a rare type who will go from chuckling at the exploits of Weng Weng or Little Superstar in a two minute YouTube clip to actually seeking out and watching one of their movies in its entirety. (I am one of those two kinds of people. Can you guess which one?)